1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image processing device for estimating motion of a moving object is moving included in a series of images and for determining the direction in which the moving object within the series of images.
2. Description of the Prior Art
A prior art method of determining the direction in which a moving object included in a series of images is moving using a neural network, is disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laying Open (KOKAI) No. 4-241077, The prior art method is called optical flow which can reflect the motion of the moving object in order to estimate a velocity vector of each point in the moving object. In the prior art method, by using a function representing a constraint that the velocity vector varies smoothly in the vicinity of each point, computations are carried out repeatedly until the function converges to an equilibrium. An optical flow can be obtained as the computation result.
A problem with the prior art image processing device is that it needs a large amount of storage in order to carry out a large number of computations repeatedly using real numbers having high precision and further needs hardware used for speeding up the computation of the optical flow to provide the optical flow in real time.